The Branding I Ran Myself

Where Wayne Sat and Who Watched From the Road

Wayne could not rope and he could not wrestle, and the dust was no good for his lungs.

So we set him up on the lowered tailgate of the pickup, upwind, with a lawn chair cushion under him and the tally book open on his knee.

Keeping tally is a real job and an honored one. Somebody has to count.

Every calf worked, steer or heifer, every one treated, the running number called out and marked down.

At the end of the day you know exactly what you did and what you missed.

I gave it to Wayne because it was the one job on the place he could still do sitting down.

A man needs a job at his own branding. And I was not going to let cancer make him a spectator on his own ground.

So he sat there all morning in his wool cap, thin as a fence rail, calling “that’s one-forty, that’s a heifer” in a voice that did not carry as far as it used to.

Every roper and every wrestler made sure to sing the count back to him loud, so he knew they heard.

That is a thing neighbors do without being told.

They made my sick husband the center of that branding, every one of them, routing the whole day’s count through his tailgate.

He sat up straighter as the morning went on. By noon there was color in his face I had not seen since before the port went in.

Around the middle of the morning I saw a pickup slow down out on the county road, up on the rise above the corrals. It stopped.

It sat there with the engine running. It was Gil. I knew the truck.

He parked up on the public road, where I could not run him off, and he sat and he watched us work his old job.

He watched the whole county that he had quietly kept away for years ride back in, and do in one day what he swore it took a hired man to run.